Drawing

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

For most of its early history in the Western tradition, drawing did not stand on its own. Through antiquity and the Middle Ages drawing played an instrumental, subordinate role, feeding into other, larger projects rather than standing as finished work in itself. A monastic scribe might draw to plan an illuminated initial; a workshop might draw to plan a mosaic, a mural, or the design of a sculpted figure for a Gothic church. In every one of these settings, the drawing was a means to an end, a tool consumed in the making of something else, rarely preserved or valued for its own sake. That changed toward the end of the fourteenth century, in the workshops of northern Italy. Drawing began to be practiced and kept as an independent artistic document rather than a disposable working tool. The shift did not happen all at once. Early sketchbooks, among them those associated with Giovannino de Grassi, Antonio Pisanello and Jacopo Bellini, still leaned on standardized workshop models even as they opened space for individual observation and copying from antique sources. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the drawings coming out of different regions and different hands had begun to diverge noticeably, each carrying the mark of a particular artist's personality rather than a shared formula. The clearest evidence that drawing had become its own art form arrived with the generation of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. Michelangelo's sheets produced what is often called the first connoisseur drawings, drawings collected and esteemed as personal documents in their own right rather than as by-products of a painting or sculpture commission. North of the Alps, Albrecht Durer is credited as the artist who most forcefully championed the autonomy of drawing, joined by artists such as Altdorfer and Huber, whose landscape studies carried an emotional feeling for nature well before Romanticism existed as a named movement. By the time Mannerism took hold across Italy, roughly 1525 to 1600, drawing had settled into the role it has held since, valued equally as an artist's private working method and as a public, collectible statement in its own right.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Drawing is defined less by any single material than by a way of building an image, mark by mark, with line doing most of the representational work. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it, in formal terms, the primarily linear rendition of objects in the visible world, as well as of concepts, thoughts, attitudes, emotions and fantasies given visual form. Tate's shorter definition arrives at nearly the same place from a different direction, describing drawing as essentially a technique in which images are depicted on a surface by making lines, while allowing that washes, tone and other non-linear elements often extend a drawn image beyond pure line. The materials associated with drawing are comparatively direct and simple: dry media including charcoal, slate pencils, graphite points, metal styli, chalks and colored crayons, and wet media including diluted paint. The surface receiving these marks has historically been almost anything with a plane, from papyrus and parchment to cloth, wood, metal, ceramic, stone, walls, glass and sand, well before paper became the medium's default support. What separates drawing from its nearest neighbor, painting, is not simply the tool but the relationship between the artist's hand and the finished object. Painting builds an image chiefly through passages of color and mass; drawing builds it chiefly through the structural logic of line, reinforced, where an artist chooses, by techniques such as hatching, in which parallel strokes model the fall of light and the roundness of a form, and cross hatching, which deepens shadow through overlapping sets of lines. Drawing is further separated from prints and other reproduced graphic images because a direct relationship exists between production and result: a drawn line is the artist's own gesture, made once, without an intervening plate, block or mold, part of why drawing is often called the most personal of all artistic statements. That directness has let drawing serve two roles throughout its history, a private tool for an artist's own thinking and, since the Renaissance, a finished and collectible work of art in its own right.